


The Precipice

by FangirlFiles



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series), Thomas Sanders
Genre: Angst, Emotional Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mention of Past Abuse, Not Virgil/Emile, but nothing graphic, past break up, slight suicidal thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-09 18:13:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15273381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FangirlFiles/pseuds/FangirlFiles
Summary: He didn’t know what words would be cremated on his tongue before pouring out of his mouth like ashes in the wind. He didn’t know what dead, rotting taste would fill his mouth when he said them or what sickness would spread through him when the words touched his tongue. He just didn’t know.--It's been a long time since Virgil went through a bad breakup, and he's finally ready to face it with some help from his friend Emile. Sometimes venting is all he needs to ease his soul.





	The Precipice

**Author's Note:**

> TW: Past break up, slight suicidal thoughts, mention of sexual abuse, nothing graphic.

“I can’t be your therapist, we both know that. But I can be your friend, Virgil. So... please. Please just let me in.”

That’s what Emile had said before Virgil finally let him drag him to the car. He climbed into the passenger seat and gave the seat belt a sharp tug, locking it so that he could use it as an uncomfortable pillow that seemed to slice through his neck. He stared out the window as the scenery moved past, the sky turning from an angry red to a somber purple, until finally it all faded to a black that was only broken up by the harshness of the street lights that came between him and the vast velvet sky above.

He wanted nothing more than for that sky to split in two and fall down around him, clamping shut beneath his feet and pulling him into whatever lies beyond the stars. He wanted it to release the pressure in his chest and to untangle the knot in his throat. He wanted the fresh mist of the clouds to dip into his tear ducts and replace the salt water that pooled there. He just wanted to feel like he could breathe.

Emile was silent in the driver’s seat as he streamed a calming playlist from Spotify on low volume. It was just loud enough that the silence didn’t fill Virgil’s ears, and quiet enough that he could speak, if he wanted to. Which he didn’t. Not yet, anyway. He couldn’t. If he opened his mouth, it would all pour out. That would be fine, he knew. Emile was used to that kind of thing, no matter how many tears came with it. But the problem was that he didn’t know what words would be cremated on his tongue before pouring out of his mouth like ashes in the wind. He didn’t know what dead, rotting taste would fill his mouth when he said them or what sickness would spread through him when the words touched his tongue. He just didn’t know.

Eventually the playlist began to repeat songs, and Virgil couldn’t stand it. He wasn’t sure if Emile hadn’t noticed or if he was just letting it continue to play on purpose, but it was infuriating. It was stupid, he knew, that such a small thing was getting under his skin so much. Every beat dug further into his pores until they reached his bones, crawling under his muscles and nesting into the pit of his stomach. He wanted it to stop. Finally he grabbed Emile’s phone and tugged the auxiliary cord out of it, setting the phone back into the cup holder and throwing the cord onto the floor mat beneath his feet. He took a deep, shaky breath and hated that it didn’t make him feel better. He looked over at Emile, who had glanced down at the action and then back to the road, no reaction showing on his face.

“Sorry,” Virgil finally said, sitting up abruptly and feeling the seat belt unlock and become a heavy weight on his chest as he tucked his hands under his thighs.

“It’s okay,” Emile replied. He said nothing else.

Virgil shifted awkwardly in the quiet, suddenly hyper aware of the hum of the engine and the sound of the seat belt tugging and retracting as he moved. “Aren’t you going to ask me how it makes me feel or something?”

Emile spared a glance toward him. Headlights illuminated his questioning expression as a vehicle passed going the opposite direction, hurtling forward in the dark and far away from them. “How what makes you feel?”

“I don’t know. Being here in the car and going who knows where. The repeating music. The fact that I’m pretty sure you kept it going on purpose.”

He shook his head a little, a small, slow movement that would feel full of judgement if it were done by anyone else. “I told you I couldn’t be your therapist, remember? So, no. I’m not going to ask how it makes you feel. But if it helps any, I know where we’re going. We’re almost there, actually.”

“We’re actually going somewhere? I thought this was just… you know, going for a drive or whatever.” Virgil looked out the window again, trying to get some clue as to where they were going but seeing no answers hiding in the thick trees surrounding the road.

“You always end up going somewhere, even when you’re going nowhere.”

Virgil snorted. “Right, whatever that means.”

Silence fell between them again as Emile turned the car down a gravel road that winded upward. The trees around them began to thin out, and Virgil pushed down his intrusive imagination as it tried to remind him of Slenderman and every crime show that he had ever watched. This kind of place in the middle of the night was exactly where people end up kidnapped or murdered. Maybe he wouldn’t care so much if he were alone and it was only his life he had to worry about. Maybe he wouldn’t worry about it at all, if that were the case.

The car finally came to a stop in a three space parking lot, if you could call it that. The only thing keeping them from driving off the edge of the cliff in front of them was a shoddy wooden fence that sagged sadly. Virgil felt the sudden urge to give it a swift kick and see if it fell.

Emile unbuckled himself and opened the car door, turning to look at Virgil. “I’m going to stretch my legs. You can come if you’d like.”

Virgil watched as he climbed out of the car and put a foot up on the bottom plank of the fence, putting his full weight against it to stretch his calves. It didn’t budge. For some reason, that disappointed Virgil. He wanted to see it come tumbling down. He wanted to see every last piece of wood of that shitty fence fall to the ground, and then he wanted to take them and hurl them off the edge while they dug splinters into his hands. Instead, he climbed out of the car, slamming the door a little too hard behind him, and walked right past the fence.

He stepped up to the edge of the cliff and felt the warm breeze push his hair into his eyes. It was all going the wrong way but he didn’t move the purple strands away. They would just blow right back to where they were now. He stood there for a while, feeling Emile’s eyes on him. Virgil wondered what he was thinking about him, standing there so close to the edge, so clearly in distress. He wondered if Emile thought he wanted to jump, and then he wondered if maybe he really did want to. He didn’t, he quickly remembered, beating that thought back into his subconscious. He really didn’t.

Emile came up beside him and Virgil watched him as he stared out at the world laid out in front of them. His eyes closed softly as another gust of light wind swept between them, and Virgil finally turned his eyes to the horizon and let himself see what Emile was looking at in awe. The city lights twinkled below them and he realized that this was the sight that made people say that dense cities looked like stars in the night. His heart ached, longing to look at it the way that those people did. All that he could see were lights, far too many of them. He wished that they would all blink out one by one until everything was coated in a veil of darkness. He wanted the lights to be snuffed out and then the stars, followed quickly after by the moon. The image flooded his head along with the sound that you hear in movies when entire rows of factory lights go off.

It was only after the sound in his mind stopped that he realized he had closed his eyes.

He opened them again and noticed that Emile had sat down cross legged next to him, his elbows resting on his thighs. How long had he been standing there? He shook his head a little, his imaginary etch-a-sketch city vanishing as he sat down too, bringing his knees to his chest and wrapping his arms tightly around them. “I’m surprised you brought me here and let me stand on the precipice of death. Figured you’d worry that I would jump or something.”

Emile hummed, a low sound that rumbled from his chest. “Do you want to?”

Virgil shook his head. “No.” There was a long beat of silence before he settled his chin onto his knees. “But I want to want to. I know that it isn’t true, and that this is horrible to say, but I feel like it would almost be easier to want to.”

Another hum came from beside him.

Virgil laid back, letting his legs hang off the edge and feeling the grass tickle his ears. He stretched his hands out toward the sky, twirling his fingers around the stars as if he could catch them. He teased them for a while, fingers swirling between them until he clenched his hands into fists and brought them down to his sides, opening them palms up and releasing crushed imaginary stardust into the air. “I hate not knowing what I’m feeling. It’s like there’s so much in me and I just can’t hold onto it long enough to identify it and deal with it. I just… I hate that he could do this to me, and he doesn’t even know. Or care. Or… anything.”

Emile looked up to the sky and Virgil felt his stomach churn knowing how vastly different their perceptions of it were. “Do you want to see him again?”

“No,” Virgil answered quickly, the word erupting from his throat of it’s own volition. He bit his lip, chewing on it lightly for a long moment. “No. I don’t ever want to see him again. I just want… I don’t know. I want him to know how he hurt me. I want him to see all of the things I’ve changed in my life since he left, to see how much better off I am without him. I want him to see me and realize how much he’s missing, and to wish he could have it back. And then I want to laugh in his face and tell him that he’s a piece of shit and that nothing he could say would ever bring me back to him. I just want him to _know._ ”

“You want closure.” Emile nodded. After a few moments of silence, he stood. “Stay here.”

Virgil sat up and watched him walk away, suddenly feeling cold and abandoned before pushing that thought away. He tapped his heels against the rockface beneath him, leaning back on the palms of his hands. Closure would be nice. He had been abandoned so quickly, without any warning. Everything was fine one moment and then he was hiding in Patton’s room while the person he thought he knew moved through their two-bedroom apartment like a stranger, collecting his things and removing them like a criminal taking care of the evidence he left. He was gone in under twenty minutes, and Virgil never heard anything from him again. The only sign that any of it had ever happened was the underlying anger that Patton showed occasionally when the mention of how Virgil had been hurt was brought up. Closure was something he would never really be able to get, not without seeing him again. That was something that he could never do.

Emile came back with a pile of rocks, and Virgil raised his eyebrows in confusion.

“This,” Emile said, handing Virgil a rock, “is not closure. I can’t give you that. But it’ll give you something to help vent out all of that pent up anger.”

“Wow, a rock. Just what I’ve always wanted,” Virgil deadpanned, moving it back and forth between his hands.

“You’re very welcome. Now take that rock and chuck it straight into the trees down there, and tell me what you’re angry about.” He flashed an almost mischievous grin, like he knew exactly how stupid Virgil thought the idea was, but was going to force him to do it anyway. Which was exactly what was happening. “Go on.”

“I’m not saying it,” Virgil said, shaking his head. “I’ll chuck rocks all you want but I’m not going to yell my problems into the city like it’s some cheesy movie.”

“Oh, alright. I’ll just take it back then.” Emile snatched the rock right out of Virgil’s hands, chucking it hard into the trees. A satisfying crack echoed up from below, and he grabbed another rock, tossing it lightly and catching it again.

Virgil watched the rock bounce in his hand, and suddenly he just wanted to rip it out of Emile’s grip and throw it as hard as he could, putting everything he had into it and sending it flying all the way to the city that spread out in front of him. He imagined throwing it so hard that it crashed through the window of the man who still plagued his heart, and he would pick it up in confusion and then seethe over the fact that he would need to get a new window. Virgil narrowed his eyes and furrowed his brows before holding his palm out toward Emile. “Give me that fucking rock.”

Emile grinned and gripped it tightly in his fingers. “Only if you say it.”

Virgil clenched his jaw, curling his upper lip. “Fine,” he mumbled, and then the rock was in his hand. It felt heavier than it should, and his fingers curled tightly around it. It felt more like a weapon, like a loaded gun, like everything that was weighing him down flooded into it, filling it so full of anger that it strained his wrist with the weight of it. He stood, twisting his wrist in a small circle before muttering, “this is for shitty breakups.”

The second the rock left his fingertips, he wanted it back. He wanted to reach out and grab it, to pull it back to him and clutch it to his chest. He wanted to press it into his ribcage and feel it settle down onto his diaphragm. He wanted his words to follow, tied onto the stone like string, and he wanted to choke them back down into his throat. When he heard it crack against the wood of a tree, his breath left him like he had the wind knocked out of him. He felt a little lighter, and just a little more free. Emile already had another rock held out to him.

“This is for abandoning us when I did everything that I could to make you see me,” he growled through clenched teeth, throwing the next rock even harder. He felt the strain in his forearm, but it felt good. It felt like something was finally happening, like the dams in his brain and heart that were holding back the black, infected sludge of his feelings had burst and things were finally starting to move again.

“And this is for never loving me, despite telling me every fucking day that I was perfect! Liar.” His growl had turned into a tearful snarl as he chucked another, heavier rock, but he didn’t care. He spared a glance at Emile, but he wasn’t looking. He simply held up another rock and stared out at the city lights. His presence was comforting, but Virgil was doing this healing on his own.

“And this,” he said, lightly tossing the rock into the air and catching it again in one hand before throwing it with everything that he had, feeling his shoulders and back tense as he pulled his arm back and then release all at once, “is for making me feel like no one else could ever love me!”

His voice rose in an angry crescendo, tears running freely down his cheeks and dripping from his chin. The sludge had cleared and now there was a fast moving river with a current strong enough to drag you under if you dared step foot in it. His chest heaved with emotion, breathing fully for the first time in a long time. It felt like too much but somehow still not enough. It felt like something he should have opened it up slower, like a bandaid that he was too scared to rip off. He was hyperventilating slightly, his upper lip beginning to tingle.

He sat down heavily next to Emile, who held another rock in his hands. His eyes were soft and comforting, like he knew that there was just one more thing that needed to be coaxed out. Of course he knew. “One more, make it a good one.”

Virgil took the last rock and held it between his hands for a long time. He held it like a baby bird that had fallen out of it’s nest, as if he was wondering whether he should put it out of its misery or care for it and then set it free. He wished that he had more anger to put into this one, but there was only a deep, painful sorrow for it. He took the rock in one hand and held it out in front of him, slowly tilting his hand for it to fall to the ground below. His voice came out in a soft, broken whisper. “This is for looking at me like I was nothing, but fucking me like I was everything.”

Because that was it. That was the reason that he could never fully get the closure he needed. He couldn’t ever look into the face of the man who had broken him down until sex was a piece of gum plugging a hole in the bottom of a sinking ship. He couldn’t ever stand tall in front of the man who had made him feel so small and worthless. No matter how far away he walked, there would always be something of that man in the shadow that followed him.

He had always assured Virgil that he was perfect, that all they needed was to be a little bit more “physical”. He always said that they were fine, that nothing was wrong, and then he would put his heavy hands on Virgil’s skin and tell him that he was beautiful. The ground was falling out beneath them but he just kept saying that it would be fine, that he just needed to let him touch him more despite the anxiety that his touch caused, until one day he fell right through the cracks like sand through his fingertips, and then he was gone.

He only cried a few times after he left, having spent all of his tears in the months before everything fell apart, wondering what he was doing wrong and how he could fix it. Tears hadn’t come to him in a long time. Now they poured out freely, and his hands came up to his face, palms pressing into his eyes. His lips parted in a silent sob that didn’t come, his shoulders tensed and his lungs burning for him to breathe but he couldn’t, not yet.

Emile’s arms wrapped around his shoulders as he pulled Virgil into his chest, his chin resting in his hair. His hand pressed lightly between his shoulder blades and it was like he powered Virgil on again, his sobs coming to life with a deep gasp. They stayed that way for a long time, Virgil’s shoulders heaving as his fingertips kneaded roughly in the front of Emile’s cardigan, until his breaths came in shaky hiccups and until the early risers in the city began to wake up.

Eventually, Virgil pushed himself out of Emile’s grip and wiped his face with his sleeve. He took a deep breath and stared out at the city of stars in front of him, and found that maybe it wasn’t so bad to let the lights keep shining for a bit longer. He let his eyes mindlessly follow the headlights of cars in the distance as he spoke in a quiet, raspy voice. “I’m better now than I ever was with him, I know that.”

“That doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t hurt,” Emile said, turning to look out at the city as well. “It will probably hurt for a long time. But you’re already healing, and you will keep healing until one day you realize that you’re okay.”

Virgil nodded slowly, finally turning to look Emile in the eye. “Please don’t tell anyone.”

Emile shook his head with a soft smile. “I won’t. Doctor patient confidentiality.”

“I thought you couldn’t be my therapist?”

“Eh,” Emile stood, dusting himself off and holding a hand out to Virgil. “I’m always a therapist. It’s kind of a part of me now.”

Virgil took his hand and let himself be pulled up off the ground. He followed Emile back toward the car, lightly patting one of the fence posts on his way by. Neither of them would be falling apart any time soon. Not if he could help it.


End file.
